6 weeks ago, I was wondering what was happening to my orchid plant. A bit of background info: i have very little experience with orchids and growing plants in general. So to me, this little plant looked dry and dead (picture on the left). Looking at it, I contemplated throwing it in the bin because to my untrained eye, the plant was simply done.

However, I followed my gut to keep feeding and watering, just to see what would happen. Two weeks ago, to my surprise and relief, the first sign of a flower appeared. Now it looks beautiful (picture on the right).

I believe that this same principle could apply to life as we know it. You may be reading this and wondering when your efforts towards a particular venture or job would start paying off. You may have sunk in a lot of money, made so many calls…with nothing to show for it.

If you are convinced that you are on the right path, follow your convictions and continue to push and who knows, with time, just like my little orchid, your efforts could pay off.

Now, in hindsight, I can now see that in the picture on the left, there were little bubs which to someone who had more experience with plants, would have meant that the orchid really was not dead (or dying). But, isn’t this the whole point? Sometimes what you see does not necessarily reflect reality.

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While carrying on with the research I wrote about in my last post, I watched more interviews and read more articles about successful people and I found one common denominator between all of them – they had been working on their crafts for years, even decades before most people began to hear of them.

Sure, few people may have heard of them during their silent years, when they were still trying to make it, but most of them were only truly known after they had put in many years of hard work. In some cases, some of these people we hear of now, had to beg people to collaborate with them, sometimes even giving their products out for free.

Just some days ago, I came across a Facebook post from Esther Ijewere-Kalejaiye, renowned rape activist and Founder and Executive Director at Rubies Ink Initiative. In that post, she recounted how back in 2010, she had to go from one news outfit to the other to “beg” for interviews and features just to make her vision believable. Now her initiative and charity is regarded in Nigeria as the go-to place for rape survivors to receive support and care.

True to the way the Principle of Recognition works, I also recently stumbled on a CNN Money article from 2006 on Twitter. The title of the article was, “10 People who don’t matter”. The aim of the list was to highlight people who the readers could safely snub at conferences. Amongst the 10 executives on the list were CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings and Mark Zuckerberg, Founder of Facebook.

What struck me most while reading through the article, was not that the fact that the two names are now very relevant, but that this article was written about 10 years ago and even before then, these two people have been working and fine-tuning products Netflix and Facebook, both of which are now very relevant.

I personally, did not know about Netflix until a little more than two years ago, when I discovered that it was possible to stream movies and TV shows through the platform. For Facebook, you have to live under a very secluded rock not to have heard of the social-networking site which as at 2015, had 1.55 billion active users worldwide.

But look how long ago, these people had been on their grind.

If you cast our minds to any successful person you know, be her/him an actor, musician or entrepreneur and listen or read their stories, you will find that my observation applies. Sometimes their success may appear as instant, but if you dig deeper, you will discover that they, like others had been on the grind for much longer than it appears to a casual observer.

Finding this out was very eye-opening to me particularly, as we seem to live in a time when a lot of people want and crave instant gratification, often packing up their bags and tools when they don’t see the success they seek within a short period of time.

You may be reading this post, while in the process of starting something that perhaps, is taking longer than expected or is really difficult to execute. Just stay on your grind, resting safe in the knowledge that with time, the success you seek will materialise. Also stay open to receiving inspiration and adapting your ideas when better ways of executing them emerge.